Verdant Skies [In Development]

All other video games not related to the main farming series - Pokemon, Stardew Valley, My Time at Portia, and other indie-developed games.
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LeBurns
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Post  Posted:

The tool upgrades look cool. I just thought that with how you changed up the watering crops and fishing the other more primitive tools could use an upgrade also. Very glad to see you considering people's input though.

I get that there's a lot more that needs to be done before the social side is focused on so I can understand those 'sneak peeks' coming later. This game is coming around with some nice changes and a new setting that I'm really looking forward to seeing.

I noticed that last pic has shadows on everything. Nice touch.
Archiel
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Post  Posted:

As requested, here's a bit of an update to the social parts of the game:

Making New Friends
As you build your colony on Viridis Primus, you’ll also be building relationships with your fellow colonists. Today we’ll explore some of the technical and creative tricks we use to craft the immersive narrative in Verdant Skies. We’ll also give you an update on our Steam integration progress and reveal another NPC.
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Steam Integration
Once you’ve got a Steam page set up, you need to integrate the Steam library into your game. We’re working on support for Steam achievements, cloud saves, and the steam workshop. Scott ( @slembcke ) is helping out with the integration, and so far we’ve got the game launching with the library activated and the Steam overlay showing up. Achievements are unlocking, so the rest of the Steam features should be wrapped up soon!
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Relationship Progression
Like many games in the life simulation genre, Verdant Skies offers you an opportunity to befriend and romance a set of non-player characters (NPCs). There are 12 NPCs in your colony. Any player can date all of them… in one play through.

Your relationship progression is tracked with a bar and a set of 9 hearts which appear at the bottom of the NPC dialogue box. The bar fills as you complete collection events and speak to your potential mates. Answering their questions in a favorable way can award bonus points towards achieving the next heart event. However, answering in a negative manner can decrease your relationship points. So listen carefully to what people have to say to ensure you don’t offend them!

The first 6 events for all characters are available regardless of if you choose to date someone. Events 7-9 are accessible once you have elected to date that NPC. Some of the colonists require exclusive dating, while others are willing to let you explore relationships with multiple people at the same time before settling down.

Even if you decide to move in or take commitment vows with one NPC, the journal feature, which we discussed in our July newsletter, allows you to break up with your current significant other to pursue (or resume) a relationship with another.
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Friendship, Move In, Committed, and Baby badges. These appear in place of the hearts in dialogue boxes when you reach these milestones with the colonists of Viridis Primus.

Branching Dialogues
Depending on your previous choices, NPCs will react differently to you. Some decisions (like in the example below) are flagged and triggered within the same event. However, other decisions can have lasting effects. You may not immediately feel the impact of your decisions, but there are always repercussions.

We’re up to 35,000 lines of dialogue, but we’re not finished yet! Along with their 9 relationship events, each NPC also has daily dialogues that correspond to each level of your relationship.
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Variables
In order to make you feel like you’re a part of the colony, we use different variables to track player and NPC names. Depending on your level of friendship, each NPC also may call you by a different nickname or pet name. They’ll also know if you’re already dating another colonist and will refer to them by name.
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Introducing Doctor Zaheen Patel
Colonists of Viridis Primus who fall ill will have the privilege of being treated by Doctor Zaheen Patel. Mindfully practicing medicine through a holistic approach, Zaheen is well liked by their patients. Zaheen’s presence in the colony is sure to help with morale due to their warm nature and conflict resolution skills.
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JayDucky03
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Post  Posted:

This looks amazing!
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LeBurns
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Post  Posted:

Thanks for the social update!

Just one quick question though (ok I'm lying, it's several questions), we can ... well friendzone someone without them hating you? I guess what I'm asking is since we can romance anyone, male or female, we can still build up someone's friendship and ... well leave it at that, but still build friendship? Or say we can just friend someone and then after a lot more playing we decide that, "hey that person is pretty cool, I may want to get to know them better" and we can still express a romantic interest to them, or is it one shot and that's it?

Knowing how I play I'll want to be the best friend I can to everyone, but if only one I'm romantcially interested in I don't want everyone else to hate me once they get to 5 hearts and I friendzone them.

I get some of these answer may be spoilerish so it's ok if you can't give a lot of details into it.

PS - Like the new guy. That's pretty cool.
Archiel
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Post  Posted:

Thanks both of you! Yeah, after you mentioned the social stuff I realized we haven't explained a lot of the unique parts of our relationships, so thanks for the suggestion!
LeBurns wrote:Thanks for the social update!

Just one quick question though (ok I'm lying, it's several questions), we can ... well friendzone someone without them hating you? I guess what I'm asking is since we can romance anyone, male or female, we can still build up someone's friendship and ... well leave it at that, but still build friendship? Or say we can just friend someone and then after a lot more playing we decide that, "hey that person is pretty cool, I may want to get to know them better" and we can still express a romantic interest to them, or is it one shot and that's it?

Knowing how I play I'll want to be the best friend I can to everyone, but if only one I'm romantcially interested in I don't want everyone else to hate me once they get to 5 hearts and I friendzone them.

I get some of these answer may be spoilerish so it's ok if you can't give a lot of details into it.

PS - Like the new guy. That's pretty cool.
For each person, there's a sort of turning point event where you can decide if you want to pursue a relationship with them or not. It's usually about the 6th event. They each react differently when they bring it up- if you turn them down they might laugh it off, be understanding- I think there's one who is mad at you for a day or two. After that, you get the "Just Friends" badge with that person, and you're going down that path. So the daily dialogs change to represent that state of your relationship and it opens some new doors. You can use that character's journal to try to start dating someone you're "Just Friends" with. You do have something of a "Should we date?" dialog with all the characters at some point, male and female.

If you don't date someone, they all get over it pretty quickly. If you're already dating someone, most people will say some variation of: "I know you're already seeing someone, but if that ever changes, let me know".

Each character is pretty clear about their expectations when you're dating, and they have a few different attitudes to long term commitment.

It sounds like you play the same way I do- we wanted to make it so if you were good friends with everyone you still got to learn most of the details of that character's background. So you'll definitely get at least 6 relationship events per character down the friendship route. The last 3 or so are specific to dating or marriage.

I won't spoil any specific character things, but I'll note that getting to "Just Friends" with some characters will unlock other interactions, like hints at a budding romance between two characters that you're "Just Friends" with, or other comments like "I'm really glad you're friends with XYZ too, did you know that she... etc"
Lenna36
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Post  Posted:

So are there rival couples then? That's something that most of us would list as a part of our wishlist for Harvest Moon games.
Anonny
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Post  Posted:

If there aren't rival marriages, PLEASE incorporate them, I don't get married/date in hm games now because I hate being the only character that has the ability to do so, looks really good so far though :)
Archiel
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Post  Posted:

They're more like rival dating, or flirting. They don't ever make it official right now, because the rival interactions don't prevent you from stepping in and starting to date someone.

Our big motivation for those sorts of events is to make sure to give the other characters some life of their own- so things are still happening in the world when you've settled down with someone. Any thoughts or ideas on what's important in rival relationships would be cool to hear! :D
Lenna36
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Post  Posted:

Just my opinion, but I would like to see other characters settle down. It's strange that the MC would be the only one. I think there would be at least one or two other offical couples in a group of 12 singles. Maybe not all settle, but just enough do so it doesn't feel like the whole town's love life revolves around the player.

I love hearing that the rivals date. It's something I've missed so much from the older HM games. I'm just glad that it's a feature. :)
Annony
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Post  Posted:

You could set specific dates in which characters get married (this would take some playtesting but could be worth it)? so while dating they are still available, as soon as the day for their marriage date comes though, they get married (Perhaps a period of time where the bachelor/ette becomes unavailable)? (Then if you have high enough hearts you can boycott the marriage?) kind of like RF2, that way you can also have rival kids (Whom interact with your own) which further increases the play-ability, I loved having rival kids in HM ToT, HM AP, RF2, etc.
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Blue Rose
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In my opinion, i think the most ideal set up for rival romances is that its player-initiated only. Events can be seen up to a certain point for maybe some idea of what the couple would be like (basically friendship events pre-dating) but after seeing those, a dialogue option could be given (or placed at a certain day/time weekly) that would be the equivalent of "hey i hear so-and-so likes you." Tie it in with maybe friendship requirements for either the events themselves or this matchmaking recommendation; and imo i think that would be the best balance for players and rival romance.

For rival couples, people generally take it 2 or 3 ways; they either like it and like to see other couples beyond themselves get together, they either don't like it and feel stressed about accidentally triggering requirements and essentially lockimy themselves out of prospective significant others (this was a big problem with AP cause they tied the rival romance events to same-« Chicken Hugging » friendship points and if you triggered the final event, that couple was locked in with said rival partner), and a mesh of both.

In a perfect-perfect world, a multiple option matchmaking system I think would be lots of fun (such as fire emblem kind of set up, but ideally a much smaller scale/options), but that's a looot of resources to burn.

Anyway, game is looking great! Can't wait to see more development.
Archiel
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Post  Posted:

These are really good suggestions, thanks! Today I wrote an event where Rosie gets pretty flirty with Anthony. (Assuming you aren't dating Rosie, then the dialog changes to something that's actually pretty funny).

We're definitely going to make sure rival relationships don't lock you out of anything. I think this means keeping them pretty lightweight. It's something they hint at but probably won't outright state.

I like the matchmaking idea! I haven't played Fire Emblem. But yeah, as you suspected it's probably too late in the game for something big like that. Especially with all the combinations of dialog that would need.

I'm hoping that even with this pretty lightweight system of rival relationships, you still get a feeling of other people settling down.. (at least until you divorce your spouse and switch characters, heh.)
Archiel
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Post  Posted:

Announcing Mod Support!
Customize artwork, dialogs, mails, items, crafting recipes and more using the Verdant Skies modding system! Since development started, we knew we wanted to support modding. We're allowing users to use the same methods we used to create the content for the game to create their own content.
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Load multiple mods at once, and sort them in priority order (if mods override the same content, the one on top takes precedence).

With the modding system, you can override just about any artwork in the game. We also provide an option to export the artwork of character you've created in the dressing room, to make it much easier to create new characters. You can add new items, and decide what is needed to craft those items:
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All of the character events were created using our dialog editor, which is fully available to mod authors. This scripting is easy to jump into, you don't need to know a programming language to make something really neat. You can add events to existing characters, replace events, or even add new characters. You can also create mails and quests. Each character's core info can be changed too - such as their schedule, where they wander, if they require exclusive dating, their pet names for the player, and the things that they collect.
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Right now, there are a few limitations. While all the quests in-game were created by this system, a few of them have special triggers in the code that you won't be able to replicate. These are mostly tutorial-type quests that trigger when you do something special, like grow your first crop in the marsh. At launch, you won't be able to create new houses for your new characters... fortunately, players can construct a visitor lodge with plenty of room for new NPCs. And finally, we're still working on a way to allow modders to specify their own waypoints when scripting events that include a lot of walking.
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New Tool Upgrades
Here's some more awesome icon work from Sarah Seember Huisken (https://www.movieshouting.com/) . Upgraded fishing spears throw faster and your catch radius increases - making it easier to get the elusive '3 fish with one spear' achievement.
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Meet Anthony Washington
Anthony Washington is Jade's younger brother. Rebellious by nature, Anthony refused to take part in their family's business and instead pursued a career in the military. However, after being injured in the line of duty, he has graciously accepted Jade's invitation to serve as the colony's security officer.
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LeBurns
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Post  Posted:

Mods? MODS? I have to admit I wasn't even expecting something like that. My mind is just twirling with all the possibilities.
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Blue Rose
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Post  Posted:

Oooooh, that's really exciting about the mods! That will definitely open a LOT of doors of possibilities. Also, Anthony is a cutie! <3
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